Swallowing Bitterness
by Amand-r
Summary: Serial killers (typical fic subject), ennui, poetry, discontent and autopsies (later, bowls of soba will fly around)


This is a fanfiction involving characters from Rurouni Kenshin. I do not own these characters, namely Saitoh Hajime, Sanosuke or Takani Megumi. All of those characters belong to Nobuhiro Watsuki, Sony, etc etc etc...la la la, not me. Gomen.  
  
See notes at the end. Please.  
  
SWALLOWING BITTERNESS A Rurouni Kenshin Fanfiction By Amand-r  
  
TASHINAMU: (verb) to privately devote oneself to a cause or project  
  
Death poems are mere delusion- death is death  
  
-Toko, haiku poet, died 1795  
  
Saitou sighed and ground out his cigarette under one polished boot. Tokyo was a booming city, but he wasn't fond of it. His eyes watched the yakata- bune ferrying people across the river. The point of his whole job, he mused, dictated that he spend more time in one place than he felt was warranted.  
  
But for now-he turned to look back at the scene on the wooden bridge. His hard-soled shoes made a grinding noise on the wood of the dock, and several men looked up at the sound, their eyes suspicious. Then again, Saitou didn't blame them; their current task was rather disgusting, picking up a body as mutilated as the one that had just been found. One of the men refused to meet his eyes as he approached the body they were wrapping in light cloth. Perhaps that hesitancy wasn't just because of the body. It pleased Saitou that people were somewhat afraid of him. It said that he hadn't lost his touch.  
  
Being with the police was much different from being Shinsengumi, even if he could still serve the same purpose. Being with the secret police gave him a sense of power that he enjoyed. Having information that others didn't provided him with a rather pleasant sensation. Right now he wasn't very amused.  
  
He hated being uninformed, and he hated being out of the loop even more. What he was here was both of those. Not only was his information slim to nothing, but what information he did have was piteously pointless. Such as the fact that the body at his feet was the fifteenth in close to eight months. The young girl was no one he recognized, but that didn't matter. No one would recognize her, despite the wrecked face.  
  
Saitou knew this was a dead end. It would be as if the girl came from no where. More people would recognize him than her, and he didn't even live here, though it was starting to feel like it.  
  
He detested murder cases that were what he termed "civilian". In other words, this was some sort of social problem, and hardly worth his time. He worked political intrigues. If he had to stay on this case, even if he caught the fucking shithead who was killing all these girls, then he would have to bring the man in. No room for his own brand of justice. Commissioner Kawaji would be pissed if he decided to dole out punishment by himself.  
  
Saitou stared at his hands before he shoved them in his pockets, turning his attention to the scene before him. The girl was completely covered, but he remembered every cut: the two across the forehead, the ones that took away her lips and nose. The two holes that used to be her eyes. Even what seemed, from a distance, a long red ribbon across her neck, edges of skin peeled back to show the insides of her throat.  
  
Two officers lifted her into a wagon. Saitou lit a cigarette and watched the wagon depart. Nothing to do, then, but amble back to his rather less- than-adequate inn and his less-than-adequate room. He could reconnoiter with Kawaji tomorrow and tell him what he knew, which was nothing special. Dead girl. No witnesses. No identity. No shit.  
  
It was all just too damn irritating. He tossed the half smoked stick in the water, laid his hands on the railing and leaned on it, staring across to the other side of the river. The night was clear. It was nights like these that he remembered the time he used to not smoke. Back with the Shinsengumi he used to be more carefree, though no one he ever knew would have called it that. They would have said that his hair was longer and that he didn't smoke.  
  
He tugged at the his collar. It was constrictive. So was the pull on his lungs. His body didn't like its current incarnation as Fujita Goro. He was balking. He was bored.  
  
Saitou Hajime started up at the stars and contemplated the road that had gotten him here.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
Megumi pulled her kerchief from her head and stuffed it into her sleeve. The family thanked her profusely for coming out this late at night to look at their grandmother. She nodded, and she knew her mouth was saying things, but in the back of her mind she wasn't really there.  
  
It had been like this since the 'Kenshin-gumi' had gotten back from Kyoto. She felt, somewhere in her chest, if she concentrated, a pain, a tightening. She wasn't worried in the physical sense. No, as a doctor she knew that what was going on wasn't really something she could treat.  
  
She knew she wasn't in love, though if she'd been diagnosing the symptoms to anyone else, that's what she would have said. She was moody (more than usual), her appetite had diminished, and she was preoccupied. To others it might even look like love.  
  
Certainly, before she saw the way that Kenshin watched Kaoru when the girl wasn't looking, she might have tried. She might have tried for the man even after that if it hadn't been for the way that Kenshin had called for Kaoru in his sleep on those long dangerous nights in Kyoto, like the name on his lips could anchor him in this time and space. She had never really told anyone just how close to death Kenshin's last fight with Shishio had brought him. No one needed ever know how close to death she felt when she realized that she had to let him go.  
  
Even as these things swirled in her head, she turned them over, tasting the edges of the memories for a possible association with how she was feeling. No, that answer was too easy. If she had really been in love, then she wouldn't accept Kaoru's invitations to dinner on such a regular basis. If it was really love, then she wouldn't be accepting Sagara Sanosuke's invitations for walks and other things, things that she was starting to enjoy, no matter what her sensibilities told her. It was something deeper, something that felt like love, like, longing.  
  
Longing for what? She shook her head, finished packing her little bag, and started down the steps. This was her last night at Dr. Genzai's and the walk wasn't really that long.  
  
Megumi sighed, leaning against the door. The stars themselves winked in flirtation, although their positions were strange. The Tokyo sky was not familiar to her, probably because she'd never taken the time to get acquainted with them.  
  
Instead of going home immediately, she walked slowly, studying the spirals of space, wondering how she had gotten to this place.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
"Fujita, I like you, and I appreciate your work, but if you light that thing in here, I'm going to assign you to the fish market." Saitou sighed and replaced the cigarette in his pocket. Commissioner Kawaji Toshiyoshi smiled indulgently from behind his desk. "Thank you."  
  
Saitou didn't bother to respond. He tossed his notebook on the desk. "Fifteen bodies, all women. No one can place them. Mutilated faces, tossed in the rivers. Three of them were dressed in the geisha style. Seven of them wore day dress. The other five were naked." He shook his head in an expression of doubt. "It could be drug oriented," he started to ramble, knowing the route the investigation always took when murder was in the pages. "It could be sexual." He wasn't ignorant. He knew about the new investigations in Europe, the ones that the English called "sex crimes". They had a series of fascinating killings done by some creature they had not yet caught.  
  
He rolled the foreign word out of his mouth, pretending he was exhaling a lung of smoke: "Rip-per." In the back of his head, it sounded raw, like the tearing of wet silk.  
  
Kawaji raised his eyebrows. "You've heard of the Rip-per case? He asked, turning his back towards a thick pile of papers. Saitou frowned. If those files were meant for him, he was going to be pissed.  
  
Kawaji placed the large stack of what looked to be mostly newspapers on the desk, and Saitou smiled. They were in a foreign language. He was so glad he hadn't learned English like he was supposed to.  
  
"How is your English these days?" Kawaji asked, as if reading his mind. He didn't deign to answer, and the Commissioner sighed. "You can't ignore the West forever, Fujita. No matter how hard you try."  
  
Saitou had no answer for that either. He wore the damn yofuku-pants. What else did they want from him? Perhaps he should give up soba and start drinking Indian tea out of little cups with handles.  
  
Kawaji picked up the china cup from its saucer and sipped once before gesturing with it. "The Ripper is new. So new that we only have the reports of his first two killings. There are more I am sure, unless they've caught him." He flipped through the yellowed papers, frowning. "It's not the killings themselves that I find interesting, but the investigative procedure." He flipped to a daguerreotype of something in black and white.  
  
Saitou's eyes examined the dead face, bloated, eyes whited out almost. Kawaji coughed. "She was stabbed thirty nine times. This one," he flipped to another picture, and a drawing of a naked body with slashes on it. "Was mutilated. And her throat is slit."  
  
Saitou looked at the woman. She was rather ugly, was his only thought. "It's not the same as here," he said, his right hand pretending as if there was a cigarette in it. It made him feel a little bit better.  
  
The commissioner shook his head. "Why does anything look similar? Not because they are the same, but because they share the marks of something bigger." He ran his hand down the photograph. "English whores slaughtered in the damp night. Geisha defaced in the end of a summer." His eyes changed then, Saitou noticed.  
  
Kawaji had always been a peacekeeper, but there was little to know about the man. He had risen through the ranks of Edo's protectors before it became Tokyo, and after the fall of Tokugawa, he retained his standing. Saitou knew he had a wife, Yugao, and three children. He also knew that he had a mistress, a registered kept geisha in one of the city's six districts, though he hadn't ever bothered to find out for himself. Something in the idea of geishas nagged at him. He needed to wrap his mind around the flimsy thought...  
  
"I show you this not because I think we have the same problem, but because I think we should consider doing these bodily examinations. These, aw-top- sees." The older man's tongue tripped on the English word."  
  
"Aw-top-see?" Saitoh frowned, staring at the pile of articles studiously clipped from American and British papers. "Body examinations? By doctors?" He had heard of them, but had yet to understand what they could possibly help with.  
  
Kawaji nodded, steepling his fingers. His eyes unfocused, and Saitou finally decided to sit in the chair across from the desk. Western furniture pissed him off, but he realized the functionality of the chair. And come to think of it, he liked the "bed", with its padded stuffed nature and head cushions, too. The inn at which he had been staying provided such things, and it was possibly the place's one redeeming trait.  
  
"Before the Bakumatsu," Kawaji said simply. "There was an incident. A court official, Anekouji Kintomo, was assassinated. Do you recall?" His eyes stared at Saitou, daring him to remember.  
  
Saitou remembered it vaguely. Anekouji Kintomo had been crazy. He had also been stabbed in the middle of the night. His body had been found with the murder weapon, a katana belonging to the battousai Tanaka Shinpei. When they had arrested Tanaka, he was genuinely astonished to find one of his weapons there. Saitou had heard that he had killed himself before anyone could stop him. It was a move that even he could admire, despite the waste.  
  
"To this day, I'm not sure it was Tanaka," Kawaji said softly. "But the sword is indubitable evidence, left behind at the scene of the crime, for someone to find. Left to be found," he echoed again, gesturing at the photographs of the English whores. His eyes met Saitou's. "I want records and I want reasons," he said firmly. "Hiding a body is easy, but doing this, and displaying it, means something. Find out what it means."  
  
That was a dismissal if he'd ever heard one. Saitou stood, collected the clippings and papers and exited. Aw-top-see. He'd need a medical doctor. He knew just where to find one.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
Megumi opened her eyes to the enveloping darkness. She had shut all of the doors, and although it was a nice night, she had no want for the chill that seemed to seep into her bones. She pulled her yukata closer to her frame and leaned against the wall.  
  
She was awake now, and there was nothing she could do about it.  
  
It had been quite a while since she'd owned her own house. In fact, she never had owned her own house. Most women didn't simply go out and buy one, but she was no stranger to innovation, and her iconoclastic nature led her to purchase the little property that sat in the middle of a Tokyo suburb not very far from the Kamiya dojo and her practice with Dr. Genzai. She had plenty of money, now that patients insisted on paying her. Plus, her reputation had somewhat grown with the rumor (she suspected started by Sano as an attempt to help her out) that she had nearly brought Kenshin back to life from the hideous battle injuries he sustained in Kyoto.  
  
At first, taking the money had seemed a betrayal of her whole mission in the first place: to atone for her wrongs as an opium maker by healing the sick and injured. But a small discussion with Sanosuke, of all people, had changed her mind.  
  
"What? You feel bad?" Sanosuke had said, using the fish bone to pick his teeth after a very good meal of beef hot pot that she had made the loafer. Under the pretext of his aching hand, she had found him on her doorstep that evening. "Think how bad they'd feel if you refused the only thing they have to give in exchange for saving their lives. Hell, I'd pay you if I had any money."  
  
She had objected, saying that most of the time life and death wasn't a worry. She was a big tender of colds, aching bones and administrator of aphrodisiacs to bored housewives.  
  
His response had been a snort. "You and Kenshin," he had mumbled. "Set up house in a shack in the forest and live on treebark and roots, why don't you?" She had been about to swat him when his eyes had turned to hers, twinkling with the yet undelivered punchline. "I like it better when you can afford meat to cook for me. And that pretty lip coloring."  
  
She had really meant to hit him. In his injured hand. But she just couldn't. And then he had given her a few ribbons he had gotten from a street vendor and then she really couldn't hit him, even when he tied one on in place of his headband and did his Kaoru impression, complete with a full blown "KEEENNNSHIIINNNN!"  
  
There was a light rap on the door. She froze, not quite sure what to do. She was a woman alone in an unfamiliar house. Her neighbors had no idea who she was, and to tell the truth, she felt a little unsure of her own ability to protect herself. When the profile against the door turned, Megumi crooked an eyebrow. If this was who she thought it was, she either didn't need protection, or no one she might be able to call could help her.  
  
Saitou Hajime was a dangerous, dangerous man.  
  
He lit a cigarette, the flare from the match making his profile even more clear. She let out a breath she hadn't even known she was holding. Should she answer the door? She certainly wasn't dressed for it, nor was she in the habit of letting men like that into her house, even if she had just moved in. Oh god. What would the neighbors think if they saw this?  
  
She breathed slowly, trying not to make any movement that would betray her presence.  
  
"Takani," Saitou's low voice droned, resonant as a temple bell. "I know you're awake."  
  
She sagged then, her shoulders slumping against the wall. Why did the idiots always come to her? What, was he hurt? Her breath caught. Was someone else hurt? Sano? Kenshin?  
  
"No one's dead or hurt, least of all your little ahou self-styled gangster," the profile outside said, reading her mind as the ex-Shinsengumi seemed wont to. "In fact, this is official."  
  
She started. He wasn't going to do anything because of the opium, was he? She knew all about his 'aku soku zan' policy.  
  
"It's not about the drugs either," he said, reading her again. "I need you to look at a body."  
  
Megumi started. Wait. Body?  
  
"Yes, a dead one. Your assistance would be most appreciated."  
  
She turned towards the bedroom and her clothes, thinking that she was an idiot for falling for such an idiot line, and that she should be in bed, sleeping. But the idea intrigued her with its very oddity. She hadn't seen much oddity lately.  
  
It also didn't escape her notice that this was a close as she was ever going to get to hearing the great Saitou Hajime say 'please'. Well, it wasn't as if he was the kind of man who would, was he?  
  
A dry voice chuckled outside. "Very true, Takani."  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
It wasn't the body that bothered her, though it was possibly the worst thing she had ever seen. She was used to horror and gore. She had lived through the Bakumatsu. Though something in the back of her mind worried that she should have been more frightened.  
  
More than anything, it was the naked and vulnerable state of it. Or *her*. The public mortuary was not very well lit, not was it very well ventilated. Megumi could count off on her fingers the number of diseases both of them could get simply from breathing too close to one of these corpses. She was about to tell Saitou this when something in his face stopped her. He was looking at the body on the low table, brows furrowed.  
  
"Left lying around," he said softly. When he looked at her, his eyes were clear again. "If you were a killer, you wouldn't leave a body lying on a bridge to be discovered." Megumi's eyes widened. Did he expect an answer? She really wasn't up for the verbal quips right now.  
  
He didn't want an answer, she realized, when he unrolled the rice paper at the end of the table by the girl's head and took out a rough gray stick, using it to trace the image of the skull. "We record the patterns of the injuries here, and then we'll have something to look at then after they dispose of the body."  
  
"What should I do?" she asked dumbly.  
  
He raised his head to stare at her, as if she had asked him who he was. "Examine the body."  
  
She gave the body a once over, not too happy to be doing it. "Okay," she said.  
  
Saitou sighed. "How did she die?" he asked her patronizingly.  
  
It was her turn to stare at him as if he was the ahou. "Her throat was cut," she stated, pointing at the more than obvious injury. He closed his eyes then, lowering his head so that it was perilously close to the dead body. His shoulders shook a little. Was he laughing? At her?  
  
"Aw-top-see," she heard him chuckle. When he looked up at her again, she was ready to belt hi one. "The famous Takani Megumi, lady fox."  
  
"Listen mister, tell me what I need to look for, and stop acting like such a prick," she growled. "I'm not too happy to be out of bed, in this hell pit." And then she added for good measure, "With you." She folded her arms and turned her head away from him to emphasize her point.  
  
When he spoke, she was shocked by the gravelly harsh tone of it. "She died of blood loss then. Not a blow to the head? Or a drug?"  
  
Megumi looked at the body again. It hadn't been cleaned, only stripped, and so the blood had crusted into thick crags at the sides and back of the neck. "Yes," she said softly. The blood is too much. If she had been killed and then the throat slit, then the blood wouldn't have flowed so well."  
  
Saitou's face was unreadable. "Tell me more." His fingers feathered over the left eyelid. "The facial wounds."  
  
Megumi tilted her head to regard the eyeless sockets. Then she dared to touch the rim of one. It was soft and giving, with a hint of bone just beyond the press of skin. She noticed his eyes when she did it: eager, intrigued. She actually touched it, and now she had to again.  
  
"Made after death," she answered. "Who was she?" She stared at the lipless creature and wondered how anyone could do this to anything remotely resembling something alive.  
  
Saitou's eyes flashed a golden hue in the lamplight, and one end of his mouth curled up. "You tell me."  
  
An hour later they had confirmed more than several noteworthy things. At least, noteworthy to Saitou. The girl had good teeth, and so she wasn't a peasant. Her hands were soft and uncalloused. House girl. She wasn't a virgin, though she had no diseases as far as the eye could tell. She had never had children, though she was battered vaginally, telling Megumi that she had probably had sex in the few hours before she had been killed. And it had been rough sex.  
  
Saitou took it all in as if she were reading poetry. He had finished his drawing, and was now busy smoking. Down in the mortuary, with all the other diseases. Megumi was sure this evening would give her lung-rot.  
  
"What else? What can you see?" he said slowly, taking another pass around the table.  
  
Megumi was tired of his little chant, asking her what she saw. Most of her suspected that it wasn't for her, but more for himself, so she kept quiet. It gave her time to run her fingers along the girl's hand and wonder about the tightness that had left her chest not long after they had started their bodily examination. She didn't even want to think about that that meant, but the cop's insistent questioning method had begun to infest her, and so in the lull she turned it towards herself.  
  
Was there something in this that she found interesting? Was it something that drew her? If it fulfilled the longing inside her, what did that say about her? That she had wanted this? And what was it that she really wanted.  
  
"Ey," Saitou rousted her out of her reverie, and she was grateful. She didn't want to think about it, she just wanted to do. Perhaps she had been thinking inwardly too much lately. Saitou handed her a scalpel. "Open the chest and stomach."  
  
Open the.?  
  
"Why?" she asked, knowing the answer. It was something that she herself had contemplated not fifteen minutes earlier, thinking that they could tell so much from stomach contents, lung condition.  
  
Saitou didn't even grace her with an answer, instead leaning back against the wall and crushing his cigarette out under his western shoes. He crossed his arms and raised the flat of one foot to press against the wall behind him. Wisps of his hair fell in his face.  
  
She looked at the knife in her hand, then at the naked white torso in front of her. It couldn't hurt her, and it might be useful. She hadn't done this in years. Her father had cut open cadavers for study, and she had done so once or twice. She knew how to do it, and this was study too, wasn't it?  
  
She wanted to do it. She wanted to see what was inside this girl.  
  
The knife met no resistance, the skin sighing open under the blade. Saitou was eerily silent as she opened the cavity for inspection. The ribs kept the lungs and heart safely hidden away, but she found the stomach and liver first, neatly incising the former and pulling apart the muscle to see for herself.  
  
The stench was everything se remembered, but it wasn't as bad as her nightmarish thought had told her it would be. Saitou shoved off the wall and moved opposite her, his own face peering in the dark cavity.  
  
"Light," she told him. He obliged with a lantern on the girl's closed thighs, with no regard for the dead. Then again, her hand was swimming in the girl's innards, so she couldn't really throw any stones.  
  
Megumi used the scalpel to swirl around the stomach contents. She wasn't going to dig into the intestines, no matter how much he prodded her to. "Rice," she said softly, pointing to the grains of it, now stained yellow. "And something darker, perhaps-" the smell hit her, a violent smack in the face, and she turned her head away. "-fish. And-" The scalpel scraped against something very hard, and she tapped it again. This wasn't food.  
  
"Wait." Her hand massaged the outside of the stomach. She really didn't want to stick her hand in there. Really didn't want to...Saitou did it for her, reaching in and digging with his right hand, eyes not even seeing her at all. He came up with a little bottle.  
  
"What?" They both muttered simultaneously, and that *did* make them both smile, for the first time. Saitou used a rag to wipe off the bottle and his hand. It was a small thing, made from fired clay. It couldn't hold more than a gram or two of anything. Megumi's mind was quick.  
  
"Drugs?" He favored her with a knowing smile and pulled the little sealed stopper from it, ready to pour whatever was in it out on the table.  
  
Nothing came. He repeatedly tapped the rim of the bottle harder and at an angle until Megumi saw an edge of something, paper, peer out. Everything in the room seemed to go away as she watched the man across from her carefully excise the little scroll. Saitou unrolled the paper with deft hands, his amber eyes narrowed.  
  
He read the contents and then snorted.  
  
"What?" Her head was swimming. Political plots, drug smuggling. Perhaps a spy for a foreign government had written it and forced the girl to swallow it. Perhaps the girl *was* the spy!  
  
"It's a poem," he told her. Even his voice registered disappointment.  
  
"The flowers withered Their color faded away, While meaninglessly I spent my days in the world And the long rains were falling."  
  
Megumi stared at the miniscule scroll of paper in the man's hand. The lines of the poem rolled in her head. She was an educated woman, but she wasn't that educated. She had been brought up like many other girls, reading poetry, writing poetry, but she couldn't do more than appreciate its beauty. One of her old childhood friends, Suzuke, could probably rattle off the author from one listening.  
  
It started to rain outside. Megumi heard the clouds let go of it, then the impact of the drops on the tree leaves outside. Saitou looked up from the little paper then, his own ear catching the sound with surprise, perhaps just irritation. Megumi doubted that anything surprised this man.  
  
"Rain," he said.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
".her throat had been cut from left to right, two distinct cuts being on left side, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut through; a bruise apparently of a thumb being on right lower jaw, also one on left cheek; the abdomen had been cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side."  
  
Saitou's eyes off centered, not because he was disgusted, but because he was bored. The reports had been interesting for a while, what little he could read in English before Kawaji had had some young officer transcribe the words on separate papers so that he could enjoy them in full gory detail. Grainy newspaper photo pictures lay alongside the drawing that he and Megumi had made, as well as the poem, now flattened after spending several hours under a stack of English dictionaries and Saitou's sword.  
  
He read it again. It sounded so familiar, but then again, so did many poems. He had put that part of his education, required though it had been, behind him years ago, before the Shinsengumi, before everything. Part of him fiddled with the notion of asking Tokio, and if she had been here, she might very well have had an answer. Instead, he set down his cup of tea (real green tea, in a real cup, with *no* easily breakable handle) and cleared his throat at the young officer still bent over the English murder papers and looking rather green while doing so.  
  
He was going to enjoy this little bit of ordering about. "Send in Chou."  
  
Minutes later:  
  
"You want me to go research some faggy ass poem?!" Chou's face was as priceless as he had suspected it would be, though Saitou didn't even crack a smirk. "I'm not running all over the city asking about fucking flowers! You do your own shit, man."  
  
Ah, the expected from the completely predictible. Saitou didn't give a shit. Chou was his errand boy when he was in town, not because he was attached to the department, or because he was attached to the secret police, but because he was a private detective. Saitou chose him as errand boy because it tickled him that an ex-Juppongatana be working for him. The worse the errand was, the more Chou complained, and the more Saitou enjoyed acting annoyed.  
  
"I want," he said, lightng a cigarette and opening a window. "Among other things, for you to shut up. " Chou ran a hand through his rather unkempt hair. "I also want you to do your job and find out where the hell this comes from."  
  
Chou crumpled the copy of the poem in his hand, rolling his eyes. "This better be something important, and not some dumb ass thing you're doing for your wife or something." When Saitou narrowed his eyes for effect, Chou threw up his hands. "What with the dead chicks and all..." his voice faded away. "Why are you on this, anyway? Someone famous dead or something?"  
  
Saitou wished he had a better answer for that. The one he did have was bland: "Someone higher up seems to think that fifteen mutilated women in one city is a rather worrisome ordeal, Chou. Be a good little errand boy and get the poem, or I'll send you back to the cells."  
  
"I cut a deal," Chou reminded him, eyes flashing defiance.  
  
That had to stop. "I'll cut you a new deal," he replied his own eyes moving noticably to his weapon out on the table.  
  
That was a dismissal if he ever created one. Anyone else might have understood that. Or cared. Instead, the younger man caught up one of the English papers, its huge title smeared across the brittle texture. Saitou sat back in his chair, wondering about how many women would have to be killed before the government would admit defeat. And if they did, it would be because of their own ineptitude, not his.  
  
"You read this gaijin shit?" Chou slid a finger over the words, not understanding them. "What's this say?"  
  
Saitou cocked his head as if he was distracted. He hadn't really forgotten Chou was here, he just wanted the young man to think he was that insignificant. His eyes flitted to the page, a huge type print on the front of the paper.  
  
"'Private detective skewered by irate police officer.' Go get those books." When Chou left, still grumbling and muttering about psycho cops and how he 'didn't need this shit' (which, Saitou knew decidedly, he *did*), he spared another glance at the paper the young man had fingered. He stopped to consider it, his lips roving over the English words, not sure himself what they meant, but sure that they were bad:  
  
A NOISELESS MIDNIGHT TERROR.  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
It was silence that she treasured in these moments. Megumi scraped the pestle against the mortar and wondered at the emptiness of the place. Dr. Genzai had long gone to the dojo for dinner, and she was supposed to follow, but something in her held her back. There was no reason, really, for her to linger; medicines could be finished tomorrow, gauze would wait to be wound, and the light would be better.  
  
She stayed anyway. Her mind turned over and over the last evening like a box with no opening. She mixed some pennyroyal in with the abortive she was making. Dr. Genzai didn't approve of her making things that killed babies, but Megumi knew what it was like to be a woman in dire straights. She wasn't sure what this would do to her karmic retribution, but she did know that she would prefer to abort a child chemically than sew up the mother after they had tried to do it themselves with something unsanitary and dangerous.  
  
//Like chopsticks,// she thought darkly, remembering the little fifteen year old who had passed out on her doorstep three months ago.  
  
This was something she didn't run by anyone, not by Sano or Ken-san, because it was too personal. It was private and secretive. For a few seconds she felt like a murderer again.  
  
Speaking of murder-- Megumi closed her eyes and pictured the body she'd examined the previous week. She'd told Saitou that the girl couldn't have been more than twenty, although the physical damage she'd been through indicated that she hadn't been a "girl" for a long time. Someone had plucked that flower long before it had bloomed.  
  
The poor poetic metaphor made her insides twist.  
  
The girl's lungs had been thick with smoke inhalation, sappy tar and traces of opiate coating the once- pink insides. Megumi had thought to use this as ammunition against Saitou's bad habit when she stopped to consider why that could possibly be an activity of merit. She didn't give a a damn about the policeman, so why bother?  
  
That he had come to her for a look at the corpse puzzled her. There must have been more than several doctors he could have consulted. Why pick her? At first she had suspected that it had been because he could. Then she had thought he was trying to irritate Ken-san through her, which was probably true.  
  
Then she stopped to think about her background, and after she had seen the girl's innards, well, it was obvious her drug knowledge was rather complete. Lastly, and this was the secret reason that she really suspected, Saitou had come to her because she was a woman. A male doctor could treat a woman, but no one could look at the female form and understand all the little quirks of it like another female. Megumi would know the difference between a clue and a fashion habit. She knew the lipsticks and the perfumes, and the little things women did to themselves to make them attractive to the opposite sex.  
  
And while Megumi knew that Saitou was married, he had never mentioned that his wife was in Tokyo, or even if she would have been the kind of woman that could see a dead body and not throw up.  
  
If that was the case, Megumi was his man. Woman. Whatever.  
  
"Like the open boat that plies familiar canals, I find that I come again and again to you."  
  
Megumi's head turned so sharply she felt it as a pain in her skull. "What?" Her heart skipped a beat before she realized just who her visitor was. Or was that after? She didn't want to think about that. Not at all.  
  
Saitou smirked, leaning in the doorway and waving a slim bound book. "The Kokinshu," he said with finality. "Pages and pages of idiotic love poems." His long fingers rapped a repeating rhythm on the book. Martial drumming. A man for war, playing its song in his heart, even in the midst of peace.  
  
"I've been researching," he added.  
  
She turned back to her table then, snorting under her breath. "Hn. Well then, by all means, continue it somewhere else. Unless you've a use for me?" Her words were carefully guarded. She didn't intend for Saitou to use her, but she meant for him to feel guilty about dragging her off to see a corpse. And making her open said corpse, and then making her dig around in the corpse.  
  
The more she thought about it, the more cross she became. So when he simply moved further into the room, she sighed. "Nothing I say will make you feel bad about last night, will it?" She tossed her pestle in the mortar, wishing that she had more light.  
  
A lamp flared on her left. "No. But if you want me to think about pretending to apologize, I might consider that." She watched one of the corners of his mouth quirk up. "Then again, maybe not." He slouched against the wall, reaching into his pocket and retrieving a cigarette.  
  
Megumi almost threw the pestle. That would have been disastrous. Instead, she threw the dry inkstone on her left. There was no way it would connect with him, she knew, but it was enough to make him pause after he sidestepped it, and the offending projectile make a perfect dent in the wall screen.  
  
"Don't you dare light that in a medical clinic," she said, slowly, her voice low. "I would think of all people, you would have the intelligence to figure out that smoking is a dangerous habit."  
  
His response was a shrug. "It keeps me from drinking," he said mildly, rolling the stick in his fingers but not lighting it. His eyes narrowed even further, but not at her, at the weed in his hand. Megumi didn't ask for elucidation. Instead, she finished the powder she was making, both of them companionably silent. Megumi dumped the contents onto a bit of squared rice paper, folding it into a small envelope. She sat back then, tired and cranky and hungry.  
  
She cracked her knuckles. Cicadas sang outside. The fireflies were long gone, but the noises of summer would continue well into fall. The death of another summer made her cringe inside. But that wasn't something she wanted to do in present company. Saitou fingered through the book, eyes never leaving the page, though she knew he would be able to tell exactly what she had been doing.  
  
"We're having the bodies we buried exhumed," he said casually. "The rest were cremated." When she turned to him, hands washed, kerchief removed and folded neatly on the table top, he snapped the book shut. "You should look at them."  
  
Anyone else might have added 'for me' at the end of that sentence, no matter what the reason. To make it sound like more of a request. To make it sound like a personal favor. Saitou had no such inclination.  
  
She tossed her head. "I'm late for dinner," she told him, "At Kaoru's." The ex-Shinsengumi's eyes narrowed again. "I'm sure I could help you later, " --heavy emphasis on the word *help*-- "If you need me."  
  
He straightened, if that was even possible. His hands fluttered as if he was unsure of what to do with them, one of them holding the book, the other the cigarette. He made to shove them into the pockets of his western trousers before he realized that he was holding things.  
  
"I'll do it myself," he said then, quiet, contempt managing to smear itself onto his insinuating mouth.  
  
Megumi reached out to snuff the first lamp. "Good. I'll go to my dinner," she smiled sweetly, knowing that she looked perfectly wonderful by single lamp light. "You go to yours."  
  
*~*~*~*~*~*~*  
  
TWO NIGHTS LATER:  
  
Saitou grunted and leaned on the bridge supports. Another night, another body. This time they had to fish it out of the water. Two of his men had sloshed out into the slow-moving waist-deep river to retrieve the sodden body, its whiteness on the dark wood of the bridge a mar in the peace that its graceful construction intended.  
  
Saitou knelt down and shooed the young officers away. One of them was the boy who had translated his English autopsies earlier that week. If reading about the dead had made him green, Saitou grimaced to think what his stomach might force him to expel onto the fresh body at his feet.  
  
He pulled back the lips of the girl. She had all her teeth, and they had been stained recently. Geisha. Long dark rivulets of hair streamed over the planks.  
  
Before he could even think about anything further, a carriage pulled up to their portion of bridge. The actual road had been closed, so Saitou knew it could only be one man. He rose and pulled back, receeding into darkness until his superior officer had a chance or need to address him. He was also fairly sure that he wanted to think the next few minutes through carefully, for his first thought had been to bring Takani here, and that really was neither the appropriate thing to do nor the thing he should *want* to do.  
  
He didn't feel like examining any other desire than aku soku zan right at this moment.  
  
Kawaji brushed past the officers to kneel down next to the body. Saitou watched from the shadows as the man pulled the blanket from the corpse, fingers going to the left knee, as if looking for a mark. Those fimgers seemed to find what they sought, for they wavered before closing into a fist to be clutched to the Comissioner's chest.  
  
"Shochu-san," he said softly. Despite what other might have said to the contrary, he was neither cold nor disrespectful. And he most certainly wasn't ignorant. Kawaji had found what he was looking for, and it was more personal than anything else.  
  
The older man's mouth formed a very thin line as he stood, his eyes not leaving the body. A long stalk of willow leaf twisted down the road, catching on the woman's thigh. That her natural urge to brush it away had been removed by the loss of life energy only seemed to make it stand out more.  
  
"Find him, Fujita." His eyes didn't even pass over the rest of the scene. Saitou watched him stalk back into the carriage, smack the upper edge of the window with his hand, and disappear into the darkened depths. The whole thing had taken a matter of minutes.  
  
Saitou sighed and signalled for the work to continue. As they brought the stretcher, he tried to freeze the scene in his memory. He would have to relate it all to Megumi later. //Or not.// Lighting a cigarette before the wind could pick up, he used the hand cupping the match light to mask his face, so that no one would see the expression when he glimpsed what Kawaji had been looking for and found. He made his examination as nonchalant as possible, but he wasn't prepared for the simplicity that had brought his boss out in the middle of the night: there, on the uncovered flesh, a simple mark, either painted or tattoed on, was one word- "koibito".  
  
END PART ONE  
  
Note One: The date Meiji 11 (1879) is precisely 10 years off for Jack the Ripper (approx 1887-8), but I couldn't resist the nudge in the direction, especially since good ol' Jack is the first reported case of sex-murder serial crimes ever investigated. The autopsy report that Saitou reads is in fact, the report of the body of Polly Nichols, the suspected 2nd or third victim of Jacky-boy (Sugden, Phillip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Carroll and Graf Publishers: New York. 1994.). This is not to say that these kinds of serial killings cannot have been done prior to that time, and most likely they had, but I just needed that little bit of oomph. Jack will not play a large part in this, nor will he likely surface again.  
  
Note Two: The serial killer idea has been explored before in RK fanfic, though I have read the slash only. I want to thank Lavender Onion for her lovely story "The Gift of Ignomy", and Franzi for her piece "A Certain Clarity", both of which were written so well that I was spellbound enough to think of them again and again while writing this.  
  
Note Three: The story of Tanaka and his being a hitokiri is true, provided by Tracy Lim's historical explorations of the RK world itself. Tanaka was the fourth hitokiri, and the mystery of his katana is still just that. Read more historical RK references here: The story of Sagara Souzou is eerily familiar.  
  
Note Four: The poems in this story are all real, not written by me. The first, pulled out of the first body Megumi examines, is by Ono no Komachi, famous poetess of the Heian era, and can be found along with the poem Saitou recites in the Kokinshu, a book of collected works of the Nara period. It, along with the Man'Yoshu (to figure later) is considered to contain some of the best poetry of Japan. More information can be gleaned from 


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